World art history

Originally published in Model Home, A Proposition by Michael Lin. Reproduced by permission of the publisher.

The aim of this show is to take away my authority and to bring in as many other people as possible…. A lot of things are being left open. not because of lack of time but because the material of the process is the subject.

—Michael Lin[1]

In this kind of space, science turns into poetics. Architecture becomes the framework in which this can occur.
—Yoshihara Tsukamoto[2]

In 1971, the Italian artist Alghiero e Boetti travelled to Afghanistan and set up an embroidery workshop at a hotel in Kabul. Working with local antiquities dealers, he gathered a group of craftswomen to produce a hand-embroidered map of the world. Following the artist’s directives, the Afghan embroiderers represented each country’s territory by the patterns and colors of its national flag. This relationship, subverting divisions between artist  and maker and giving concept, method and process equal significance in the final work of art, engaged Boetti until his death in 1994 and resulted in his best–known series, Mappa. At first, Boetti was meticulous in laying out each new map, selecting the color thread for each diagram and checking errors as work progressed over months or years. But as the series continued, he became interested in the chance mistakes the anonymous, commonly illiterate Afghan women made, particularly in their choice of color for the ocean, whose nature they had never seen: the blue morphed into green, purple, and even pink. National flags changed, too, as new territorial divisions and political identities came into being in the wake of wars, revolutions and regime changes. Inscriptions in Farsi drafted by Boetti’s coordinators make up the borders of each Mappa, usually recounting the circumstances of the local production, quoting Sufi poetry, and dating works according to the Islamic Afghan calendar. After the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 by Russian troops, Boetti’s production moved to Peshawar in Pakistan, where the group of Afghans had taken refuge.